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I'm going to try and post my thoughts on this without starting wank! Let's see if that works.
So SGA fandom is wanking about race, and as usual my roommate says everything I might want to say about it, only better. I haven't read the AU in question, I don't follow the fandom, I don't want to weigh in on the wank because the whole thing just makes me want to smack people upside the head, but I did get something interesting from the comments: Jason Momoa is half-Hawaiian. Which is, roughly, the same ethnicity as Pete Wentz, isn't it? I'm aware that 'Hawaiian' is a whole mish-mash of ethnicities in and of itself, but, well.
Let's compare: Jason Momoa vs. Pete Wentz (yes, this whole post was an excuse to post that picture of Pete in HOOKER BOOTS, what do you expect from me?) Pete obviously looks a lot whiter than Jason. And most people tend to write Pete as white, which I'm not saying is a bad thing--he mostly just looks like a tan guy, he comes from an upper-middle class background, and he never *talks* about his racial background, so I don't know if I'd really want to read fic where Pete was all about being Hawaiian or whatever. He had dreadlocks for a while, but they somehow made him look even *more* white to my eyes (possibly because they were so horrid).
My experience in most other fandoms has been that characters of color don't get written nearly as often as their white counterparts. This happens for a variety of reasons, ranging from 'I don't write about them because I don't find brown men attractive! Why are you calling me racist?' to 'The way this character gets treated in canon is so offensive and racist that I don't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole'. Now, Pete Wentz *clearly* does not have this problem of not getting written about. If writers are wibbling over getting his characterization wrong and thus offending other Hawaiians, I haven't seen it.
Now, compare this to fandom's treatment of Ronon. Not only do you have the AUs where his white counterparts are all professors or physicists and Ronon is a janitor or whatever, he doesn't get nearly as much fic written about him as white characters who have much, much smaller roles in canon (again, I'll just point to Livia being smart about this). (To be fair, there's a lot of hot porn about him compared to the way characters of color become invisible in other fandoms. Good on you, SGA fandom! Keep the porn coming!) But I still think there's a lot of white liberal guilt that keeps writers from wanting to play with Ronon, to avoid offending people.
I'm curious: do those of you reading this who occasionally like to write Pete Wentz getting it on with other dudes, does the half-Hawaiian thing make you pause before you go to write his character? I, honestly, have barely even thought about it. I was more concerned about getting into the headspace of someone who drinks his own pee on camera than his ethnicity. Maybe I'm way off-base about this and there was a ton of debate about how to handle Pete's race before I got into the fandom, but it doesn't seem to me that this fandom has many people saying 'But I'm not brown, how could I possibly get into his head?' about Pete Wentz.
Yet Ronon gets that reaction. Bandslash people, do you think if Pete looked more Pacific Islander, you would have a harder time writing him? Would you hesitate more? And how hot would Pete/Ronon be? Someone should write that crossover.
So SGA fandom is wanking about race, and as usual my roommate says everything I might want to say about it, only better. I haven't read the AU in question, I don't follow the fandom, I don't want to weigh in on the wank because the whole thing just makes me want to smack people upside the head, but I did get something interesting from the comments: Jason Momoa is half-Hawaiian. Which is, roughly, the same ethnicity as Pete Wentz, isn't it? I'm aware that 'Hawaiian' is a whole mish-mash of ethnicities in and of itself, but, well.
Let's compare: Jason Momoa vs. Pete Wentz (yes, this whole post was an excuse to post that picture of Pete in HOOKER BOOTS, what do you expect from me?) Pete obviously looks a lot whiter than Jason. And most people tend to write Pete as white, which I'm not saying is a bad thing--he mostly just looks like a tan guy, he comes from an upper-middle class background, and he never *talks* about his racial background, so I don't know if I'd really want to read fic where Pete was all about being Hawaiian or whatever. He had dreadlocks for a while, but they somehow made him look even *more* white to my eyes (possibly because they were so horrid).
My experience in most other fandoms has been that characters of color don't get written nearly as often as their white counterparts. This happens for a variety of reasons, ranging from 'I don't write about them because I don't find brown men attractive! Why are you calling me racist?' to 'The way this character gets treated in canon is so offensive and racist that I don't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole'. Now, Pete Wentz *clearly* does not have this problem of not getting written about. If writers are wibbling over getting his characterization wrong and thus offending other Hawaiians, I haven't seen it.
Now, compare this to fandom's treatment of Ronon. Not only do you have the AUs where his white counterparts are all professors or physicists and Ronon is a janitor or whatever, he doesn't get nearly as much fic written about him as white characters who have much, much smaller roles in canon (again, I'll just point to Livia being smart about this). (To be fair, there's a lot of hot porn about him compared to the way characters of color become invisible in other fandoms. Good on you, SGA fandom! Keep the porn coming!) But I still think there's a lot of white liberal guilt that keeps writers from wanting to play with Ronon, to avoid offending people.
I'm curious: do those of you reading this who occasionally like to write Pete Wentz getting it on with other dudes, does the half-Hawaiian thing make you pause before you go to write his character? I, honestly, have barely even thought about it. I was more concerned about getting into the headspace of someone who drinks his own pee on camera than his ethnicity. Maybe I'm way off-base about this and there was a ton of debate about how to handle Pete's race before I got into the fandom, but it doesn't seem to me that this fandom has many people saying 'But I'm not brown, how could I possibly get into his head?' about Pete Wentz.
Yet Ronon gets that reaction. Bandslash people, do you think if Pete looked more Pacific Islander, you would have a harder time writing him? Would you hesitate more? And how hot would Pete/Ronon be? Someone should write that crossover.
curious
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